Mandy Corrado, found via Conscientious and I Like This Art, has made some images that stand rather well with minimal statement. If you must, there is plenty of commentary at those two links, as well as an uneeded statement at her website.
Speaking of her website, I need to mention this. Sharing this work with you was a frustrating experience and it’s a testiment to my positive feelings about it that you are seeing it at all. Mandy has one of those throughly unnecisary and extremely frustrating right click messages in her site’s code – clicking anywhere on the page results in a rude and annoying pop-up informing you that it is copywrite the artist.
These things are so stupid. The images on your site are not at a print resolution and it doesn’t matter regardless: anyone browsing the internet already has a copy of your images in their cache. Also, I just viewed the source of your page, did a quick search for “.jpg” and copied the location of the image, then saved it.
If your site was flash, or that didn’t work, I would have just done a screengrab, though I do this less often. Frankly, flash sites frustrate me so much that I often don’t leave or save the work for later commentary at all.
Again, I’m not the only one. As I’ve posted about in the past, gallery owners, curators, art buyers, and art directors all want your images to be clickable, savable, and EASY. It’s to benefit you, artists. And if a few of your images end up in random places on the internet – well, don’t you want them to be seen? Otherwise, what’s the damn point of making them? It’s not like you’re ever going to get any royalties or usage fees from myspace profiles, forum avatars, and 4chan.
Hi Aleksander,
Huh… I never thought of it that way. This is my first website and I never realized that the anti-right click feature would be a problem. I’m actually pretty new to reading blogs too, so I never considered it from the bloggers point of view.
Do gallery owners, curators, art buys, etc really find it that annoying? I’m very interested in what others have to say about this, so if other people have comments, I’d love to hear it. I’ll definitely consider disabling this feature.
Thanks for the tip.
- Mandy
[Reply]
Ian Aleksander Adams Reply:
April 17th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Hey Mandy, sorry if I was a bit harsh. You didn’t really deserve to get the brunt of that rant on your first offense, haha.
A lot of students read my blog and sometimes I find that I really have to drill some things in because I see them so often.
Websites are so important, especially for getting your work out there.
I’ve made a few posts about this in the past. Recently, photoshelter also released data from a survey of art buyers about websites with a lot of good info:
http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/blog/photoshelter-photographer-website-survey/
I’d have to say that people who spend a lot of time browsing for work definitely find things like that annoying (I’ve talked with plenty of people at conferences and in email about it, and I think if you look at a lot of blogs you’ll find similar opinions.) For me, it’s right up there with websites that resize my browser, and sound that you can’t turn off that has nothing to do with the images.
The right click disable is similar to the huge watermark that covers the entire image, in that it sort of hints at the website maker’s unfamiliarity with the technology. Both can be circumvented by professionals (and any pirate of any sort is usually at the forefront of technical knowledge) and only really stand in the way of the fans of your work, whether they are saving it just because they like the image (akin to cutting a picture out of a magazine and putting it on your wall) or they want to promote you and your work (like review usage of movie stills in editorials).
I hope the feedback helps! Let me know if you have any questions at all.
[Reply]
Mandy Corrado Reply:
April 19th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Hi again Aleksander,
Wow. I really see what you are talking about. I’m going to work on fixing this so that people can right click in the future.
Thanks so much for the great suggestion!
- Mandy :-)
[Reply]
Ian Aleksander Adams Reply:
April 19th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
No problem. good luck!
[Reply]
Comment by Mandy Corrado — April 17, 2009 @ 1:43 am
PS – I checked out your site…
I really like your work.
[Reply]
Ian Aleksander Adams Reply:
April 17th, 2009 at 2:32 am
Thanks Mandy. You’re a good sport. :)
[Reply]
Comment by Mandy Corrado — April 17, 2009 @ 1:47 am